The Revolution Institution (We’re Too Cool to Be Tender)

We’re too cool to be tender, it’s true.
I got one eye on myself when I look at you.
And you laugh and say, “Why am I kissing you?”

The corporations told us to revolt
To be ourselves and rock the vote
But somehow they still got us by the throat

We’re too cool to be tender, it’s true.
We watch TV as darkness fills the room.
And we want to say what we don’t want to.

It’s so passé to want a better world;
The laughter flies before the flag’s unfurled.
And you wonder who sorts the swine from pearls?

We’re too cool to be tender it’s true
I say you’re an angel dressed in powder blue
You say that you’re rubber and I am glue

You say I’m a Jack whose bean crops always fail
I say you’re a Jill without a pail
But I feel like Ahab without a whale

Awareness of Power Lines

They were always there overhead,
like the blue of the sky.
Caught up in slack leashes,
I was kept from any other
idea of what it should look like
when I looked up.

The ubiquitous telephone poles seemed only
like some strange, weaker, sister-trees;
The rail-beds and canals seemed
to have beeen carved by the same glaciers which
(I was told) carved the valleys and streams;
The water-towers and traffic signals
appeared just as at home in the sky as
the moon and stars;
and the street lights and the sun
relieved one another, complementary hands
of the same celestial timepiece. 

 In old maps they are proud of
the Telegraph Road, and the sewers.

I imagine a hatted clump of goodly city fathers
admiring the novel lines of cables skirting farms,
and thinking with satisfaction on
the nightsoils being carried away in
underground rivers. 

But the telephone poles never flowered.
The railbeds were dry.

Our cities are strangers underfoot.

We are prostrate in the flood of history,
legs upset in the cold-salt undertow.
Is it just the dark end of 200 years
of “enlightenment”? 

Even our birds are homeless.

politics

Body language experts are the new phrenologists.

grandma

1.
only now
after reviewing so many photographs
(staring at them until my mind
can peel the sepia
from the day’s colors)
only now do I see
who you think you are:
who you’ve been carrying around
inside all along.

I resisted the image of the young girl
as you resisted the image of the old lady.
passing strange, our wiring,
and these shifting frames:
how we conspire against mortality.

2.
There was a photo of what I thought
was you and an “old flame.”
The young couple in your front yard
on an autumn day: an Irish girl
(I can see the red hair)
beaming back at the flagging sun,
stretching out the dusk, wearing a
dark button-up wool jacket, plaid skirt
falling perfectly at the center-point of her knees,
white socks rolled up unevenly;
Her weight shifted slightly back against the
tall young man standing just behind.
He has a goofy grin but a stunning swoop
of hair, and their arms are locked for
more and less than warmth.

The caption, green ballpoint pen pressed
into the dry brown page: “it couldn’t last.”

Was this your great heartbreak? The possibility
quickens the photograph; the sunlight is
a richer yet gold,
the balled-up leaves on the lawn crinkle as
she steps closer, and they relish the privacy
of the photo, where they are alone.

As it turns out it was your sister in the picture.
I am inexplicably disappointed, and a little sad
that you aren’t sweetly-sad about the boy
with the goofy grin holding you in the autumn sun.

I took out too many loans

So where’s my bail-out?

Preaching to the Race Track

Jesus knew where his word was needed.

At the Republican Convention (Groundhog Day)

Tonight television is full of bloody flags,
And the people are snarling groundhogs,
driven wild with the fantasy
that they have been beaten back
to the very brinks of their burrows. By the
thousands they shake their furry heads:
teeth gnashing the air, coats bristling,
black eyes wild with hate for the invading enemies
placed carefully in their mind’s eye.

What reasoning can there be with this shrill pack?

Truth be told, groundhogs would be preferable;
for at least they can distinguish between
real threats and false.

Love is a necessary retreat;
There is no victory to be had here.
it is only with angels that we may
wrestle to any effect:
Our reward was always in the next world.

Strawman for President

“I want to weaken our military.

I want to lose sight of where our freedoms came from.

I don’t care about families.

I don’t care about jobs.

I don’t care about America.”

[Vote Strawman for President]

***

Customer Service
Go right –  to our site
the number’s only 32 clicks away

***

the glaciers are our shrinking ground

***

Rock died with the release of Rock Band II
It’s a closed circuit

Tracks

Slums of Atlantis
BLOCKBUSTER!
You’ll Never Work in this Town Again
Out of Control Teens 
Riot
New Toye
New Tony
I Bet You It Won’t
We’ll Be Together in the Music
How to Be a Hipster

Clarification

[Warrant for this argument: inexact terminology obscures the true nature of a thing].

Calling what writers do “writing” is like calling architecture “brick-laying.”  The writing is the least of it (“poetry is before and after /all this writing”).  But embedded in this quibble are my own ideas about what writers do.

WAIF: “Are you a writer?”

WOODY ALLEN [who in this scene is NOT a writer]: “Why yes, yes, I am.  I-I’ve written things down, yes.  On many occasions.  Very recently, in fact.  I had to remember to get some Pepto Bismol from the store.”

I guess I really mean the word does a disservice to writers of the Emersonian set.  The Biggies on the literary scene, the geniuses: literally, the “begetters,” whose ideas shape ours.  Call them not writers, but “mouths,” or “tongues,” for they are the mouths and tongues of mankind.  Or “eyes” would be an improvement, as this metaphor invokes their role as seers.  Who would not find these substitutes satisfying, and even charming, if we encountered them in another language, describing the (as Joyce would say) priestly act of what we mundanely call “writing”?